Editing content · Sections, pages & folders

Folders that don't take new pages

Some folders are there to keep pages, not to grow: an archive of old posts, last year’s folder, a folder of pages the site’s code expects to be a fixed set. A developer can close those to new pages. In Orbit, a closed folder simply has no new page or new folder icon — and nothing can be added anywhere inside it.

The pages already in it are untouched: you can still open, edit and publish them as normal. Only adding is switched off.

For developers — add the folders to the section’s Blocked folders in Settings ▸ Collections, or list them under noAddTo in orbit.config.yaml:

collections:
  posts:
    noAddTo: ["archive", "drafts"]   # each folder, and everything inside it

In Settings, type a folder name and press Enter, or pick one of the section’s existing folders from the suggestions — it’s added straight away and shows as a tag under the field. Add as many as you like, one at a time; click a tag’s × to remove it. The fields are greyed out, saying why, when they can’t apply: when adding pages is off for the section, or when it has no folders yet. (To set a rule for a folder that doesn’t exist yet, write it in orbit.config.yaml.)

How folder names work:

A folder includes everything inside it: blocking archive also blocks archive/2019 and archive/2019/spring. You don’t need to add /**.
Names are relative to the section. For a folder further down, give its path: 2026/drafts blocks just the drafts inside 2026.
The top level (pages that aren’t in any folder) is a config-file option, written . — it isn’t offered in Settings. Block it to make every new page go in a folder (say, a blog sorted by year), or allow only it to keep new pages out of the folders:
```
collections:
  posts:
    noAddTo: ["."]        # new posts must go in a folder, never loose at the top
  notes:
    addTo: ["."]          # new notes only at the top, never in a folder
```
Settings shows a . already in the file as a Top level tag, and you can remove it there.

To do it the other way round — allow only certain folders — use Allowed folders (addTo), e.g. 2026 for this year only. Leave it empty and every folder is allowed. Settings won’t let you put the same folder in both lists; if a hand-edited config does, blocked wins. Orbit checks the rules again when a page is created, so they hold even if the sidebar is out of date.

The Fernway Coffee demo site uses exactly this: its journal’s archive folder keeps old posts but takes no new ones.